Paulette Harlow, 75, a mother of six and grandmother of eight, has diabetes and Hashimoto’s disease. She’s also now a convicted felon, sentenced in June to 24 months in federal prison for causing disturbance inside an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C. Harlow is one of nine co-defendants, the “Garland Nine,” whom President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act during a 2020 pro-life sit-in.

FACE is a decades-old law, but the administration weaponized it recently to target pro-life activists who demonstrate inside clinics. The other eight co-defendants have racked up similarly absurd sentences: Lauren Handy received 57 months; John Hinshaw, 21 months; William Goodman, 27 months; Jonathan Darnel, 34 months; Herb Geraghty, 27 months; Jean Marshall, 24 months; Joan Bell, 27 months; Heather Idoni, 24 months. Some of the defendants, not all, chained themselves together at the Washington Surgi-Clinic in October 2020 to prevent the abortionist, Cesare Santangelo, from killing babies. Others gathered in prayer around the clinic.

Pro-abortionists claimed that the incident showed the extremism of pro-lifers. A clinic worker testified that the defendants used “prayers and hymns like a weapon against our patients.” One patient who had taken a drug to induce labor before her scheduled abortion was denied access to the clinic for a short time during the sit-in. “I wanted the child, but there was some physical issue with that child,” she later told local news.

Several individuals have been charged with FACE violations since former president Bill Clinton signed the bill into law in 1994, and violations usually carry minimal sentences. The act gives the federal government jurisdiction over “violent, threatening, damaging, and obstructive conduct intended to injure, intimidate, or interfere with the right to seek, obtain, or provide reproductive health services” and in its legitimate applications is redundant, its critics tell National Review. Crimes prohibited under FACE are prohibited under federal and state law or local ordinances already.

Novel to the Garland Nine case is the federal government’s affixing of a felony conspiracy charge to a FACE violation: The defendants are accused of conspiring to interfere with civil rights, says Martin Cannon, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society and Handy’s lawyer. The FACE violation carries a one-year prison sentence; conspiracy charges tack on ten more years. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned abortion regulation to states, pro-life litigants made a “very serious argument that Congress has lost its jurisdiction over the matter,” Cannon said. “There’s a strong argument that FACE has simply lost its constitutional underpinnings.”

Defendants expected that their 2020 sit-in would be judged a misdemeanor and that any jail time they served would be minimal. Many of the advocates had been arrested in similar situations before. But this demonstration was significant for Handy, whom media outlets and the DOJ have branded the operation’s mastermind. Her pro-life advocacy started after she watched a video of Santangelo saying that he “would not help” babies who were born alive during an abortion. (Trying to soften his comments, Santangelo later clarified that he “would call 911” but “wouldn’t do intubation or anything. . . . You let nature take its course.”) Handy quit school to work for a pro-life organization in California. Since then, Santangelo’s D.C.-based clinic — and the doctor’s own admission of support for partial-birth abortion, which has been a federal crime since 2003 — has haunted Handy. “What’s going on at that clinic got her into the pro-life movement,” Cannon said. Santangelo’s admission is the reason Handy organized the sit-in.

It’s also the reason why, in 2022, when Handy and fellow activist Terrisa Bukovinac saw a medical-waste truck picking up boxes labeled “Washington Surgi-Clinic,” the pair took one box home to bury the children they knew were inside. Five of the 115 children — now nicknamed the “D.C. Five” — appeared to have been killed in partial-birth abortions. Despite denying that he performs such abortions, Santangelo has something of a reputation for them among pro-lifers. The doctor has also faced a myriad of medical-malpractice lawsuits, recently in the case of Rebecca Carey Charland, who suffered a miscarriage and was referred by her obstetrician to the clinic so that Santangelo could remove her baby. Fetal debris entered Charland’s lungs during Santangelo’s procedure, and she was taken to the hospital, where she died.

Charland’s family, alleging that the doctor had failed to explain the potential risks of the procedure, settled a medical-malpractice suit against him. Through public-records requests, the D.C. Department of Health uncovered previous medical-malpractice claims against Santangelo. When Handy mentioned Santangelo’s alleged criminal wrongdoing in court and told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (who sentenced the Garland Nine) that she had protested for the purpose of saving children’s lives, Kollar-Kotelly said that Handy’s explanation “merits little discussion” and that “a defendant may not don a vigilante’s hood to insert themselves into a situation of their own making and subsequently claim defense of a third person to justify their actions.” Kollar-Kotelly also refused to admit into evidence the video in which Santangelo said he would not administer care to living children. She did, however, acknowledge that “if Handy’s intent was to protect babies from being subject to partial-birth abortions, she wasn’t violating FACE.”

Partial-birth abortion is the procedure by which doctors induce labor, deliver part of a living child, and kill him or her, halfway out of the birth canal, by either compressing the child’s skull or suctioning out the brain. Effectively a form of infanticide, the procedure is performed late in pregnancy, when the child’s bones are too strong and developed for the normal late-term abortive practice of dismembering the child in the womb to be effective. One baby boy whose corpse was recovered from Santangelo’s clinic was fully formed, with all ten fingers and toes, and one of the baby girls had been decapitated and apparently dismembered before her skull was crushed. Activists asked the office of the D.C. medical examiner to perform autopsies of the children, but the DOJ authorized the examiner to incinerate the remains before that could happen. Although political pressure from pro-life Republicans eventually prevented the children from being disposed of, Attorney General Merrick Garland has not opened an investigation into the case. The children have not yet been autopsied or buried.

Biden’s DOJ has perhaps been too busy prosecuting pro-lifers such as the Garland Nine to investigate cases of infanticide. To quash claims that it has been on a witch hunt against pro-life activists, the administration has stressed that abortion clinics aren’t the only facilities protected under the FACE Act. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division specifies that the law “is not about abortions” and that it “protects all patients, providers, and facilities that provide reproductive health services, including pro-life pregnancy counseling services and any other pregnancy support facility providing reproductive health care.” FACE, however, has been used approximately 130 times to prosecute pro-lifers and only a handful of times to prosecute pro-abortionists since Roe was overturned, Emily Davis of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America tells NR.

On May 2, 2022, a still-unidentified leaker released a draft of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, alerting America that the federal protections that Roe v. Wade had granted for abortion in 1973 were about to be found unconstitutional. The next day, violent attacks began on pregnancy-resource centers (PRCs), or what Planned Parenthood calls “fake clinics.” Pro-abortion protesters sought “revenge” and immediately started to burn, desecrate, and vandalize Catholic churches and PRCs. The week after the Dobbs opinion was leaked, criminals threw Molotov cocktails into pro-life clinics, urinated on pro-life buildings, and spray-painted “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either” on clinic walls. CatholicVote tracked nearly 100 attacks on pregnancy centers in 2022 and 2023. “We saw a massive wave of violence against pregnancy-resource centers in the aftermath of the leak of the Dobbs decision,” CatholicVote’s Tommy Valentine tells NR. “We haven’t seen one single federal prosecution of an attack on the Catholic Church, including ones that are explicitly motivated by pro-abortion sentiments.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted to the Senate Homeland Security Committee in 2022 that 70 percent of abortion-related cases following the Dobbs leak were investigations of violence against pro-life organizations. Officials know that threats are more commonly leveled at PRCs, Davis says, and “yet the Biden administration has been hell-bent on using the FACE Act as a way to convict more heavy-handedly against pro-lifers and not the pro-abortion side.” Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) and Representative Chip Roy (R., Texas) introduced legislation to repeal the FACE Act last October and reintroduced the bill in May. But their media campaign has been ineffective at garnering support among the American public or in Congress. Meanwhile, all of the Garland Nine are now sentenced. Cannon says that they remain optimistic. Handy was “happy as hell” that her co-defendants received lighter sentences than hers, and she plans to spend the next five years in prison ministering to women who have received abortions: “There’s plenty of them.”